CMU Researchers Map How the Brain Processes Faces From Sight to Recognition

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are closer than ever before to understanding the neural basis of facial identification. CMU’s Mark D. Vida, a postdoctoral research fellow in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences’ Department of Psychology and Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (CNBC), David C. Plaut, Marlene Behrmann and University of Toronto Scarborough’s Adrian Nestor participated in the study published in the Dec. 26, 2016 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), where they used highly sophisticated brain imaging tools and computational methods to measure the real-time brain processes that convert the appearance of a face into the recognition of an individual. The research team is hopeful that the findings might be used in the near future to locate the exact point at which the visual perception system breaks down in different disorders and injuries, ranging from developmental dyslexia to prosopagnosia, or face blindness. Read more.